Download PDF | C. S. Watkins - History and the Supernatural in Medieval England-Cambridge University Press (2008).
290 Pages
HISTORY AND THE SUPERNATURAL IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
This is a fascinating study of religious culture in England from 1050 to 1250. Drawing on the wealth of material about religious belief and practice that survives in the chronicles, Carl Watkins explores accounts of signs, prophecies, astrology, magic, beliefs about death and the miraculous and demonic. He challenges some of the prevailing assumptions about religious belief, questioning in particular the attachment of many historians to terms such as ‘clerical’ and ‘lay’, ‘popular’ and ‘elite’, ‘Christian’ and ‘pagan’ as explanatory categories. The evidence of the chronicles is also set in its broader context through explorations of miracle collections, penitential manuals, exempla and sermons. The book traces shifts in the way the supernatural was conceptualised by learned writers and the ways in which broader patterns of belief evolved during this period. This original account sheds important new light on belief during a period in which the religious landscape was transformed.
CARL WATKINS is Lecturer in Central Medieval History at the Faculty of History, Cambridge University, and Fellow of Magdalene College.
PREFACE
More debts have been accumulated before and during the (rather too many) years of this book’s preparation for justice to be done to them in a short preface, but a number stand out for special mention. The first are to those who interested me in medieval history when I came up to Cambridge as an undergraduate: Christine Carpenter, Rosamond McKitterick and Sandra Raban. More recently, I have profited greatly from the wise advice of many scholars, especially Valerie Flint, Jonathan Riley-Smith and Miri Rubin. Magdalene College, where this book was begun during a research fellowship and where I have finally finished it as a teaching fellow, has proved the most congenial of environments in which to think and work. Special mention must be made of my immediate colleagues at Magdalene, Eamon Duffy, who kindly read and commented on sections of the book in early drafts, and Tim Harper, for the help they have rendered over the years. Seminars in Norwich, London, Bristol and Aberystwyth have offered further indispensable opportunities to test ideas, expose false assumptions and absorb invaluable advice. The manuscript of the book has benefited from the sharp eyes of a number of readers. My former research student Tom Licence bravely read the whole and saved me from many errors and infelicities. It hardly needs to be said that the remaining deficiencies of substance and style are the work of the author alone. Two final and very substantial debts remain to be acknowledged. The first is proclaimed by the dedication; the other is to Dr Martin Brett, who supervised the PhD dissertation on which this book is based and commented on drafts as it developed. What follows has been too long in the making but it would scarcely have been begun without his unfailing and patient guidance.
INTRODUCTION
The history of religious culture in medieval England has been dominated in recent decades by studies dealing variously with the early missions and the Pre-Reformation church. The intervening period, especially that from c.900 to ¢c.1200, has been the subject of rather less attention. The reasons for this are not hard to find. For historians of AngloSaxon religion the business of Christianisation can be seen as substantially complete by the early tenth century. Monastic reform and the ‘Normanisation’ of the church in England both form important historiographical pendants to narratives of Anglo-Saxon religious change, but in both cases the story has tended to be one of politics, institutions and ‘high’ cultural exchange.’ Revisionist interpreters of the Reformation meanwhile have inevitably concentrated on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in their efforts to rescue late medieval Catholicism from the condescension of Protestant posterity. Historians so engaged have stretched back to the thirteenth century where early forms of later offices and institutions such as churchwardens and chantries are dimly visible, but they seldom reached out deeper into time.” Such reluctance is in part a result of scarce resources: the rich harvest of fifteenth-century evidence — wills, letters, churchwardens’ accounts, visitation returns, sermons, instruction manuals, church art and objects — is wholly vanished or much diminished by the time we get back to the twelfth. Julia Smith has put the perceived problem in a nutshell: ‘there simply is not adequate evidence to pursue the questions that interest historians of lay religiosity before c.1200’.’ Diffidence about this earlier period is also fostered by the assumption that the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 in some sense marks a break with the past and that the religious landscape was transformed by a revolution which it accelerated or even inaugurated. The agenda of the council epitomizes a slow transformation which reformers were eager to bring about, now identified by historians as a shift from a church defined by cult, liturgy and right praxis to a ‘pastoral’ church ever more concerned with surveillance and shaping of belief through preaching and catechesis.* So in respect of evidence left to us, and more deeply, in respect of the social realities determining what was written and preserved, the twelfth century has come, for historians of later medieval religion, to be ‘another country, another world’.°
Neglect of this period is, of course, relative rather than absolute. There is a long and immensely distinguished scholarly tradition of works of institutional history and ecclesiastical biography dealing with the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The scope of recent work has also broadened beyond this. We are now far better informed about the parish, as John Blair and others have explored the development of local churches and proto-parochial structures from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries using textual traces and archaeological investigations.” Others have begun to write about the religious lives of the ordinary faithful. Ronald Finucane, Simon Yarrow and Christopher Harper-Bill have delved into saints’ lives, miracle collections and charter evidence to engage in this enterprise.’ The picture that they have constructed is valuable but inevitably fragmentary because of the limitations of what can be achieved with scattered and often unpromising evidence. Charters can disclose much about the piety of the aristocracy, but reveal far less about wider society. Miracle collections brightly illuminate relations between devotees and their saints, but they can also be treacherous, encouraging us to dwell on the cults at the expense of other features of belief and praxis.
Therefore this book will try to do something new. It deals with one aspect of religious culture, beliefs about the supernatural, in what we might think about as a (very) long twelfth century running from c.1050 to ¢.1215. But, as this period is, in historiographical terms, ‘another country, another world’, it will also use a different body of evidence to begin the business of exploration. Where others have drawn on archaeology, miracle collections and charters to offer a framework for their analysis, I intend to turn to a source which, paradoxically, is both the most obvious and the least used by historians for this sort of work: chronicles. The period encompassed by this book coincides with a profusion of historical writing in England and Normandy and so the archive is rich. It is my suggestion, and a central argument of this book, that chronicles have much to contribute to our understanding of religious culture for an age in which other resources are thin on the ground. Portents, signs, miracles, demons, angels, saints, ghosts, magical practices and even ritual sacrifices emerge in these narratives. While many historians have used the chronicles as staples of political history, few have made much of this curious exotica scattered through the more humdrum narrative of kings, battles and ecclesiastical affairs. Robert Bartlett is unusual in this respect.* In choosing to draw heavily on chronicles for the chapters of his history of Norman and Angevin England dealing with religion, Bartlett has been able to evoke the richness and variety of that aspect of culture in a way others have seldom managed. In doing this, he illustrates what might be achieved with this material.
Yet some further justification for putting the chronicles centre-stage in a monograph is needed. In essence, the intellectual reasons for making such ‘narrative’ sources the scaffold for this book about religion are not much different from the reasons for using them as a skeleton for political history. But, in thinking about the value of chronicles, there are also issues more specific to this sort of inquiry which demand attention. We need to consider the problems of studying religious culture using sources generated by a learned elite and the dangers of approaching medieval religion using the concept of the supernatural. Before addressing either of these issues however, we shall turn first to the phenomenon which makes this book possible: the proliferation of historical writing in the Anglo-Norman realm.
HISTORY IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY
The reasons for the ‘twelfth-century history boom’ need only the briefest treatment here as they have been much discussed elsewhere. Some of the earliest historical writing produced in the wake of the Norman Conquest may well have been defensive in purpose. English monasteries may have anticipated that their landed assets might be expropriated or the claims of their saintly patrons contested and so produced historical and hagiographical texts to justify both.” Recent research has also tended to stress more positive reasons for churchmen picking up their pens after 1066.'° Anglo-Saxon nostalgia and Norman curiosity both played an initial part here, but the steady formation of a distinctively ‘Anglo-Norman’ sensibility, awakened in chroniclers such as Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury a deeper interest in fitting Norman and Anglo-Saxon pasts together.'' These men wrote massive synchronising histories which erased many of the contours of ethnic hostility which are so evident in first-generation narratives.
This historiographical renaissance, however we interpret its causes, brought not only quantitative but also qualitative change.'~ Where Anglo-Saxon historical writing had been characterised by the spare annalistic format, the twelfth century witnessed the composition of much fuller narratives. Black monks led the way. Orderic styled himself as Bede’s heir and promised the same kind of expansive ‘ecclesiastical’ history; William of Malmesbury patterned his writing on a variety of classical archetypes, wearing his knowledge of dozens of classical texts on his sleeve as he wrote monumental history on a similar scale to Orderic. History also came to be written by an increasingly diverse range of authors. Beyond the cloister, seculars wrote about the past inside different frames of reference from the early Benedictine historiographers. Diocesan clergy such as Henry of Huntingdon and Gerald of Wales were joined by clerical curiales like Walter Map and Roger of Howden. Even within the ranks of monastic chroniclers, historical writing evolved during the course of the century and often acquired a more worldly edge, with, for example, Jocelin of Brakelond’s belt and braces narrative of Bury St Edmunds savouring more of administrative than sacred history.
Variety is also to be observed in the increasingly eclectic subject matter of otherwise conventional histories. Geography, natural history and extended discussions of wonders all spilled out of them. This broadening of interest was also reflected in new genres growing around the edges of the established literary forms. Gerald of Wales’s reflections on Ireland and Wales blended history, geography and what some have termed ‘ethnography’; Walter Map mixed history and fabula with moralising anecdote and political satire in his De Nugis Curialium; Gervase of Tilbury compiled a great tripartite encyclopedia of history, geography and wonders designed for the recreation of his patron, the German emperor Otto IV. With this diversification of content there came also a diversification of intellectual approach. Astrological and magical learning, cosmological speculations, mathematical and medical knowledge, the fruits of herbal, bestiary and lapidary, were absorbed into ‘historical’ writings during the course of the twelfth century. This was not simply description: these technical discourses supplied alternative ways of rationalising the world, often in terms of physical causes, which jostled the moralising explanations which had previously predominated.
This profusion of writing, its expanding scope and ambition and the growing diversity of genre and explanatory approach, ensure that chronicles have the potential to be every bit as valuable to the historian of religious culture as they are to the historian of politics. Yet the word potential is an important qualifier. There remain significant methodological obstacles in the way of using the chronicles as I have just proposed. The chroniclers were still a small and exclusive social group distinguished by their learning and their clerical status. How far we think this left chroniclers unable or unwilling to engage with ‘unlearned’ lay culture beyond the cloister or school room is the key to assessing their ultimate value. Here much depends on the historiographical assumptions with which we operate. It is to these that we must now turn.
RELIGIOUS CULTURE IN THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES: PROBLEMS AND SOURCES
Historians who have analysed religion in essentially sociological terms, and hence have tended to associate distinctive patterns of belief with particular social groups, have been among those most inclined to doubt that the beliefs of the majority might be approached at all straightforwardly through texts written by learned, clerical elites. For these scholars, many of whom have taken their cue from the important work of Jacques Le Goff, three things tend to follow from this fundamental assumption. First, medieval religion was characterised by significant tensions between the beliefs of different groups within it, elite and masses, clergy and laity, learned and unlearned.'* Secondly, exploration of ‘popular’, ‘folkloric’ or ‘unlearned’ culture demands methodologies which permit clerical texts to be read ‘against the grain’ of their prevailing learned values. Thirdly, the most useful sources for this enterprise are those formed on cultural interfaces, for example exempla-collections, sermons and penitential manuals designed by the clergy to engage with, and reshape, popular or unlearned belief.'*
These approaches have yielded tremendously rich and insightful research but they also seem to me to pose real problems for the study of medieval religion. The idea that the social group to which a person belongs might have such a determining effect on his or her religious convictions seems contestable.'” Even where the cultural breaks between ways of believing should be sharp, for example between monks and the aristocracy, it is in practice difficult to discern clear lines. Aristocratic families supplied the cloisters with recruits, were bound to them by the frequent exchange of gifts for prayers, and celebrated association with the life of renunciation because it seemed so valuable to the sinner in the world.'® Monk and warrior were not marooned on either side of a cultural divide and so, I would argue, it becomes harder to accept that the monastic writer cannot bear witness to the warrior’s beliefs. The case for the absence of a clear line of cultural demarcation seems still more compelling at lower levels of the social hierarchy. The parish priest, escapes easy categorisation in any ‘two cultures’ model. On the face of it he belongs in the clerical box but how much meaning should be attached to that easy judgement is open to doubt. The aspirations of Gregorian reformers are clear enough. Their sacerdotalism demanded a celibate, non-hereditary, educated clergy more closely aligned with diocesan agendas. But priests were still, in the twelfth century, drawn largely from the peasant communities they served. They probably soaked up from the community many ideas which were local and ‘unofficial’ and mixed these into the formal teachings of the church. Few parish priests will serve as our witnesses in this study, and so the methodological implications of that claim are restricted. But it needs to be stressed that even archdeacons, though more learned and more closely tied to bishop and diocese than the parish clergy, were not, as we shall see, straightforwardly the champions of ‘official’ teaching in the localities. Their writings will loom large in what follows and, as we shall see, reveal more complex cultural formations, affinities and sympathies than one might initially expect.
We also need to address a further problem of ‘two cultures’ approaches to the exploration of religion. This concerns evidence. Much use has been made of exempla by Jean-Claude Schmitt and Aron Gurevich because they contend that in such texts churchmen appropriated elements of ‘popular’ or ‘folkloric’ culture, incorporated them into didactic stories, thus pressing them into the service of dominant clerical ideologies.'’ Gurevich for example, has argued that ‘folk’ stories reworked by churchmen were turned into bearers of official clerical teachings as the two were combined in improving tales rich in cultural detail recognisable to the audience. The extension of this line of reasoning is that careful study might allow the historian to reconstruct from fragments in these normative texts the beliefs and values of the unlearned masses.
Yet there are problems here. First, the very act of privileging exempla risks distorting our view of the relationship between laity and clergy. It reinforces the assumption that religious culture was characterised by difterence and friction. Exempla, setting out to correct abuses and improve morals, inevitably sharpened the distinction between the preacher (with his official agenda) and the audience (which needed to be corrected and chivvied towards orthodoxy and orthopraxis). As revealed in such texts, the preacher and his congregation can easily be imagined as the representatives of two very different cultures caught in a tense embrace.
Secondly, the idea that popular or folkloric culture might easily be excavated from exempla seems open to question. Everything suggests that Gurevich’s ‘folkloric’ culture would have been locally varied (we would need good reasons to think it otherwise) and yet exempla writers engaged in producing materials for ad status preaching to the ordinary laity seldom aimed their collections at specific communities or localities. While they might well have appropriated elements of ‘folkloric’ culture for use in their tales, it seems doubtful that these could bear quite the didactic burdens Gurevich envisages. As exempla tended to enjoy more than a local currency, the need for ‘authenticity’ in the representation of appropriated folk belief would have diminished and the possibilities for stylised and imaginative reworking would grow. The effect of all this is to make the business of recovering the ‘authentic’ belief of ‘the folk’ from exempla collections much more difficult.
Recovery of this ‘popular’ or ‘folkloric culture’ from another seemingly rich source, the penitential, is also attended by problems. These manuals aspired to comprehensiveness in the advice offered to confessors about the unchristian beliefs and practices they were to root out. And yet they mixed very general moral prohibitions against murder, robbery, adultery, sacrilege and fornication with injunctions against ‘folk’ beliefs and practices which appear to have been much more specific.'* The problem here lies in measuring the significance of these very particular references. They might be quite widespread in the texts, surfacing in a variety of manuscripts over a considerable geographical area, but this might not mean that such beliefs and practices were widespread too. The snippets of text might travel not because they were applicable in the regions where the penitentials were put to use but because they kept the company ofa host of general moral injunctions which were socially relevant and valuable to the confessor. The innate conservatism of canon law is important here: the recopying and stitching together of existing canons might ensure that local details were swept up and widely circulated even if their relevance was lost.
Exempla and penitentials can thus conjure up powerful illusions. But there is also a further difficulty about using them. It has long been axiomatic that exempla and penitential handbooks allow us to see the beliefs of those they were designed to instruct only through a glass darkly. But these texts might also be treacherous if used to reconstruct the thought of churchmen who wrote them. Conventions of particular didactic genres and the weight of legal and theological tradition shaped these writings to an unusual degree, complicating the relationship between author and text. The key question here is what happens when clerical authors were freed from the close constraints which govern normative genres. An exploration of the narrative sources allows us to pose tentative answers. In them, we get a chance to observe clerical authors — and on rare but precious occasions clerical authors who also produced normative writings — operating in a different literary context, subject to different ‘rules’ of genre. This exercise will be a major theme of this book.
If ‘two cultures’ models of religious culture, and the evidence which they depend upon, seem problematic, might an alternative approach help? Recent work on the religious history of England, particularly the rich historiography of the fifteenth century, has taken less account of the ‘two cultures’ thesis and many scholars in this field have tended to assume a more culturally homogeneous ‘Christian Middle Ages’.'” Historians such as Eamon Duffy and John Bossy have argued for the existence of a single community of Christian believers bound together by shared belief, ritual and practice.“° Duffy in particular has suggested that systematic clerical teaching, the sacramental system of the church and the danger of damnation for those who stood outside it were compelling reasons for the laity to adhere to orthodoxy and orthopraxis which, in their parochial expressions, they had in any case been heavily involved in shaping. The spiritual bindings of this community were explicitly Christian. Life was marked by sacramental rites of passage. Time was marbled by the church’s annual pattern of feasts and fasts. Where the faithful needed supernatural aid, they turned not to ‘pagan’ or ‘magical’ remedies but to practices evolved from the liturgy.’ Duffy invites us to imagine medieval religion not as separate boxes containing distinctive cultures but as a spectrum along which varied co-existing pieties were arrayed.
We might be tempted to apply this approach to religious culture in the central middle ages. Indeed, research into the cult of saints in the earlier period suggests that a version of this model has much to commend it. Despite the localism of many individual cults, studies of miracle collections suggest the existence of substantial unities. Saints might have particular clienteles, drawing their pilgrims primarily from the peasants of local parishes or the monks of a community which housed the shrine, but the communion ultimately transcended such divisions in the universality of its appeal. The help of the saints was sought by ordinary priest and prelate, monk and layman, knight and peasant and by men and women from the four corners of medieval England.*~ The ‘very special dead’ were at the centre of twelfth-century religion and possessed a widespread imaginative power. Repertoires of ritual employed to draw down aid also resembled each other from shrine to shrine. Similar patterns of vowed coins and candles, pernoctation near to the tomb, even ‘measuring’ diseased limbs to the saint with a thread which was turned into a trindle emerged across England. And yet, just as it is dangerous to rely too exclusively on the witness of penitentials and exempla, so it is also risky to trust exclusively the testimony of miracle collections. In doing so, we might simply substitute for the tensions of ‘two cultures’ harmonies of a ‘Christian Middle Ages’ perhaps more appropriate to a later period.
For the fact is that, in thinking about religious belief and practice, we must be mindful of the otherness of that ‘other country’ which was twelfth-century England. First, England in c.1100 had only relatively recently been on the receiving end of the last in a series of transfusions of pagan blood (courtesy of the second phase of Viking incursions). In the eleventh century pagan practices were still the subject of legislative campaigns and even in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ecclesiastical criticisms of these lingered.*? This must inevitably raise questions about the character of twelfth-century religious culture that are less pressing when thinking about the later middle ages. We need to consider how these references should be evaluated and whether there was scope for the ‘pagan’ to linger within the formal structures of Christianity or beneath the surface of official observances. Secondly, we must also think about the connected issue of pastoral provision. If the faithful were bound into asingle Christian community, then much hinges on the forms of pastoral care afforded them. This in turn depends on the education of the local clergy and their ability to minister to their flocks and transmit knowledge through preaching, teaching and catechesis.
Thirdly, and perhaps most fundamentally, we also need to recognise that the official teachings of the church in this period themselves lacked the clarity which they had come to possess by the later middle ages. The creation of new and shared intellectual discourses about the faith was the work of the twelfth century. That process of scholastic debate stretched by Sir Richard Southern’s rough estimation up to c.1170, by which point a basic theology had been hammered out (though much, as he acknowledged, was still open and contested). Then began the matter of fashioning what was agreed into new systems of teachings which might be digested in diocese and parish, a task begun by men such as Peter Chanter and the scholars who sat at his feet in Paris during the last quarter of the twelfth century.**
This sketch should not imply any simple ‘trickle-down’ of new teachings. Southern himself would not have accepted such a contention and recent work by historians sensitive to the implications of the linguistic turn caution us further against any such simple assumption. They have shown that the church, as it engaged with lay communities, proved unable to ‘fix’ the denotations of sacred words, rituals and symbols in quite the ways intended.*° For reasons intrinsic to language itself, preaching and catechesis in practice multiplied meanings which they had sought to confine. Yet I also want to enter two caveats to such arguments here. The first is a minor point and it leads us back to the questionable usefulness of distinguishing the thought of the clergy from that of the laity: if meanings were difficult to fix in exchanges between teaching clergy and their flocks, then we should anticipate similar complexity in the conversations among churchmen. We must recall, in other words, that the thought of churchmen was far from monolithic in practice even if they subscribed in theory to shared teachings.~° It is my contention that we can discern something of this in reflections about the world and the faith contained in the clerical writings to be discussed in the following pages.
The second point is perhaps of greater importance. Arguments about the essential instability of meaning, whether applied to conversations among the clergy or attempts to instruct the laity, must not be pressed too far. We need to avoid being dazzled by the diversity that we have discovered in medieval religious culture as a result of them. Meanings might indeed proliferate as churchmen preached and catechised, but frequencies in the case of certain understandings and denotations of rituals, images and texts were greater than in the case of others. Mapping this range of meanings is easier than testing their relative frequencies and so we might be more naturally inclined to do just that, risking a partial reconstruction of religious culture. Moreover, such mapping exercises also, indirectly, feed our own preoccupations. The richness and plurality uncovered in medieval religion appeals to the twenty-first century historian immersed in a culture where such characteristics are affirmed and celebrated. Yet to privilege them in medieval Christianity risks settling for a reading too coloured by the concerns of our own postmodern and post-Christian age. Cores of shared thought and action gave medieval Christianity its power: through these came explanation and consolation. The development of shared ideas and practices surely generated tension as churchmen tried to tighten religious observance in the localities and inculcate new or more closely defined beliefs. Nevertheless, this process also involved collusion as well. The business of creating and disseminating a practical theology, of sculpting the abstract formulations of the schools into workable systems of religious praxis and belief, forced churchmen to engage with lay needs and to make compromises with the local communities which sustained the developing parishes. Thus, although significant diversity was intrinsic to Christianity in the central middle ages, reflected in religious localism, sustained by ongoing compromises between church teaching and lay demands, it was also circumscribed by widely shared needs which the faith must meet.
TEXT, AUTHOR AND AUDIENCE
The notes of scepticism that I have already sounded about the notion that social category had a determining effect on belief have further ramifications for the approach taken in this book. It is one of its central contentions that ecclesiastical chroniclers do not stand as representatives of a monolithic clerical culture but rather as members of more complex and varied communities. Membership ofa monastic house or association with a diocese or a sense of solidarity within an order or school had a shaping but not determining effect on their outlook. We need to remember that even monks were usually not writing in deep seclusion: to believe this would be to swallow idealised images of their separation from the world and to neglect kernels of truth in caricatures of worldliness. Richard of Devizes mischievously observed that, for all the trumpeted asceticism and remoteness of the Carthusians, they seemed better-informed about secular business than he was, a Benedictine supposedly fallen from grace; Walter Map felt able to lampoon money-grubbing Cistercians for the benefit of his court audience.*’ Almost by definition, the monks and canons who wrote history were in regular communication with the world. They were also shaped by experiences before they entered the cloister and might dredge up memories from childhood as they wrote in maturity and old age. William of Newburgh recalled from his boyhood in the north-east a res mirabilis, a story about a peasant who stumbled on a fairy banquet in a hill as he walked home one night and stole a silver cup from the supernatural revellers as a memento.** Monastic chroniclers remained in contact with the world in later life too. The oblate Orderic knew about politics through a web of informants and about local (and sometimes more distant) affairs through his own travels. He went far afield to Crowland and to Worcester but he also wandered the countryside around his own monastery of St Evroul. We learn, for example, that, on hearing of the providential destruction of a hay cart by a lightning bolt at Planches, he hurried from La Merlerault, where he had been staying, ‘to be certain of the facts before recording for posterity how the blow fell from heaven’.”’ Orderic’s fellow Benedictine William of Malmesbury was better travelled. Rodney Thomson has observed that his extensive journeyings — to Canterbury, Glastonbury, Worcester, Bury St Edmunds, Oxford, Rochester, Sherborne, Crowland, Hereford, York, Carlisle and more — must have demanded some relaxation of the Rule. He travelled in the first instance to plunder information from the libraries, but he scooped up oral recollections and eyewitness evidence too as he traversed the realm.*°
This ‘worldliness’ had a further effect on the way chroniclers wrote. It obliged them to criss-cross a line between two different kinds of knowledge which we might loosely think of as being derived respectively from revelation and experience. The church taught firmly that truths were disclosed most surely through the former and could be apprehended in the scriptures. But some at least within the church were becoming more comfortable with the idea that truths might also be approached through sense-experience and the exercise of reason. The business of writing history obliged the chronicler to engage with both of these ways of thinking. His scriptural formation and theological training taught how the world should be, but experience acquired through the craft of history forced him also to deal with the messy complexity of the world as it was. Both approaches, in theory, should have led to the same destination. History had the power to illuminate theology because by reading about the past, as John of Salisbury observed, ‘the invisible things of God may be clearly seen through the things that are done’.*’ But, in practice, chroniclers found difficulty in trying to reconcile revelation and experience. They struggled to discern in the messy complexities of existence those signs, glories and punishments which theology suggested might be there.
This problem is important. If chroniclers responded by subjugating history to the demands of theology, then narratives of past events would be emplotted in profoundly ahistorical ways. But, on the whole, they did not react in this way.** The intractability of history instead provoked two contrasting responses. One was to abandon the whole business of contingent speculation about the past in favour of the firm truths which scripture supplied. This was the ‘Cistercian solution’. The order (at least in its formal avowals) eschewed writing history because it entangled one in vanities and frivolities. Side-lining the study of the past became one more way in which the world was to be rejected.**
The other response was to write history while admitting that meanings extracted from it were contingent and provisional and, ina sense, endlessly deferred. This was the solution of the Benedictine monks, Augustinian canons and secular clergy who are the principal dramatis personae of the following pages. The writers who took such a view inked out their accounts with a deep self-consciousness that the historian’s powers of explanation were circumscribed and that his calling was in consequence a humble one. This idea was rehearsed regularly in prefaces. Yet its frequency should not suggest we are dealing merely with the mechanical utterance of a ‘humility’ topos but rather that we are witnessing the expression of an important consensus about the historical project and its limitations.** Prefatory acknowledgement that historical writing had limited explanatory power supplied a measure of absolution from the obligation to interpret. It set the chronicler at liberty to leave loose ends untidied. Faced by inexplicable drownings of many people in pools around St Evroul, Orderic Vitalis observed, ‘I am not able to unravel the divine plan by which all things are made and cannot explain the hidden causes of things; I am engaged merely in the writing ofhistorical annals ... Who can penetrate the inscrutable? I make a record of events as I have seen or heard of them, for the benefit of future generations ...’*> Writing at the end of the twelfth century, William of Newburgh uttered standard words about his unworthiness in his preface but he also pressed them into service when tackling difficult cases. Dealing with a mysterious portent which appeared on the London to Dunstable road, William said that he was unable to explain what this foreshadowed. Excusing himself, he added that everyone must make their own estimation of its meaning ‘for Iam but a simple narrator, and not a predicting interpreter’.°° That there was pattern and meaning in history was without question, but William, like his peers, was not obliged to work all of this out: some at least of the labour was left to the audience.
The task of writing history thus became less grandiose but also less daunting. It meant setting down those things which the particular author deemed ‘worthy of being remembered’; conserving memory of the past for the judgement of posterity and allowing others to ponder its deeper mysteries.°’ Orderic Vitalis warned his readers that if history was not captured in ink then worlds would vanish, ‘as hail or snow melt in the waters of a swift river, swept away by the current never to return’.*° William of Newburgh evoked his art in similar if more prosaic terms, explaining that Abbot Ernald of Rievaulx had commissioned him to write ‘for the knowledge and instruction of posterity’.*’ If, he contended, knowledge of recent events was not ‘transmitted to lasting memory by written documents’, then ‘the negligence of modern men must be deservedly blamed’.*° Prosaic or poetic, the implications of these prefatory claims were similar. Theology might have priority in the chronicler’s thoughts but it would not have all-consuming power over his account of the past. The chronicler humbly offered an image of the world. It was for others to do the difficult job of deducing truths from the history he had written, to work out from ‘the things that are done’ the ‘invisible things of God’.
This contention runs against the grain of some recent research which has been at pains to point out the literariness of the medieval chronicle. Its production turned on the emplotment of material according to ideological commitments, narrative tropes and the powerful shaping effects of genre.*’ Yet genre cannot be the unmoved mover of chronicle writing, confining and shaping that which was said. Such conventions were themselves plastic in the twelfth century as history was, as we have observed, written in proliferating forms.*” We must also be careful not to allow a valuable attentiveness to the literariness of medieval historical writing to dissolve its essential historical claims. Monika Otter, in a lively exploration of twelfth-century chronicle production, has been eager to find the fictive heart in these narratives. For her, the marvellous and supernatural became ‘a sign of self-conscious fiction’, a discursive arena within the chronicle in which ‘playful self-referentiality’ became possible and a commentary was offered through this on the very business of writing history.** But it is far from clear that the chroniclers viewed tales of wonders as opportunities for this kind of reflexive exercise. Indeed, it is far from clear that they forged distinctions between ‘the historical’ and the fictive in quite the way Otter wants to suggest. The power (and danger) of the marvellous lay not in the opportunities it afforded for authorial introspection but rather in the glimpses it supplied of disturbing alternative realities.
Other students of chronicles have responded to the linguistic turn in a different way, perceiving the text as a form of political instrumentality and objecting to any attempt to reach through it to the world the text claims to represent. For example Gabrielle Spiegel has examined vernacular chronicle-writing in thirteenth-century France in order to show how historical narratives used the appearance of truthful reportage as a tool to create a socially and politically useful past.** In this account, the past is instrumentalised and refashioned, even as the chronicler claims to recover it, and the ‘verisimilitude’ of that representation depends not upon correspondence of the text’s claims to observed realities but rather upon its consonance with larger ideological structures. The text works to authorise and reinforce the social, political and ideological commitments of the audience for whom it was fashioned. And yet, as Spiegel readily admits, to make such a point about the essential opacity of the chronicles demands that she accept that other texts offered more straightforward access to extra-textual social and political realities. Only by applying such an evidential double standard would it be possible to elucidate the social, economic and political circumstances of authors and audiences which gave rise to the ideological commitments shaping chronicle-narrative.
The argument, at once powerful and disconcerting, is problematic because it stretches a valuable point to an extreme. It also depends on a vision of the audience which gives rise to further difficulty. There are good reasons to think that chroniclers and their audiences lacked the sort of ideological cohesion needed for chronicles to function in the ways Spiegel suggests. In thinking about the intended audience, we need to acknowledge that this need not have been a charmed circle. If we consider for a moment the case of the Latin chronicles, we are not necessarily dealing with a purely clerical constituency. Many chroniclers had an eye on aristocratic lay patrons (to whom their works were frequently dedicated) as well as readers within the church. When the target audience was primarily the professed religious it must also be recalled that monasteries were not quite the places of spiritual introversion that their rules and apologetic proclaimed. Orderic Vitalis’s account of the past was composed for “pleasure and profit of the servants of God’ and was marked up with breathings for reading aloud, perhaps in the refectory.*° Its contents might have been expected to filter out not only to learned oblates but also to adult converts among whose ranks were retired warriors. Thus Orderic’s discussions of conversion to the monastic life, of sacrilegious acts, of managing sin through gift-giving, though they might be stylised, needed nonetheless to resonate with men who knew the world and its values all too well.
That the audiences for chronicles were not sealed off within their own cultural sphere, contained within their own distinctive ‘environments’ of knowledge about the wider world means that the audience would have acted as a control on historical representation. Faced by a more heterogeneous audience, verisimilitude could not depend on shared ideologies but would have to rely more on consonance with observed social, political and cultural realities. Such demands would have been most powerful where things described were familiar and close at hand. Chronicles, for all their inevitable selectivity, might thus most obviously afford valuable information about customs and rituals of locality and region. But they are also valuable in another way. The miraculous, the demonic and more ambiguous manifestations of the supernatural are all depicted in chronicles as part of the fabric of local and immediate experience. Here the strategies of authentication and authorisation employed offer clues about how the chronicler expected his audience to receive a story and how, in consequence, the ordinary course of nature and ‘supernatural’ eruptions within it were imagined. From relative weights of testimony and corroboration piled up in support of different accounts, we can discern something of what it was anticipated the audience would find it easier or harder to believe.
CONCEPTUALISING THE SUPERNATURAL
Employing the concept of the supernatural in an exploration of twelfthcentury culture needs some justification because the chroniclers themselves used terms which were either more precise or more general than this word. They wrote quite specifically of miracles (miracula), demons, signs (signa/portenta). But they also employed a series of more elastic terms: monstrum (wonders, frequently monstrous, which revealed or portended something usually undefined), prodigy (prodigium) and marvel (mirum/mirabilium) in order to connote the ambiguously uncanny. The term supernaturalis was available in the twelfth century but seems to have acquired close definition and widespread use only in the later thirteenth, thanks in large measure to the efforts of Thomas Aquinas.*° Nonetheless, I would contend that the idea preceded its sharp formulation as a concept. The mistake here might be to imagine that the theologians drove change when in reality they followed developments which they were obliged to accommodate. As we shall see, ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ were distinguished in a rough-and-ready fashion before definitions were formalised in the schools.*”7 Even Augustine seemed to allow such a distinction.** Twelfth-century representations of his thinking emphasised the ultimate wondrousness of all things because they proceeded from the first and greatest miracle of creation itself. But they also allowed that, from the subjective standpoint of men, God seemed to work both through the ordered patterns of nature and more directly, ‘miraculously’, in his creation. Benedicta Ward has described this as a ‘psychological’ theory of miracle. At its root was a distinction between ordinary and extraordinary manifestations of divine power, the embryo, in other words, of a separation of natural and supernatural orders.*”
Most chroniclers were equipped with at least this basic Augustinian intellectualisation of the customary course of nature and things contrary to it and responded intuitively to the wonder which the extraordinary evoked.°° Even the schematic accounts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle found space for comets, bloodmoons and showers of stars which stood out against the grain of common experience and acquired some special significance as a consequence. Eleventh- and twelfth-century chronicles incorporated more elaborate stories of wild huntsmen, devils, apparitions, revenants, fairies and strange subterranean worlds. These, like the comets and bloodmoons, demanded attention because they were significant and because they stirred up astonishment.*' Associated with that distinction between the ordinary and extraordinary, we also discover a field of emotional language connotative of wonder.°* Just as there was no sharply delineated idea of the supernatural there was also no clear-cut category of the wondrous or fhe marvellous, but chroniclers did mark strange events out as mirabilis, prodigiosus or monstruosus.>
So, although in a theological sense the supernatural did not exist as a formal intellectual category in the twelfth century, the embryo of the idea had already come into being. God’s interventions in the world were not thought in any technical sense to be ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ a nature in which pattern and order was the product of autonomy. But, as Alexander Murray has noted, firmer distinctions were steadily being drawn between the observed patterns of nature and anomalies within them.°* The meaning of the word supernaturalis may have been refined by Thomas Aquinas but the germ of the idea was present in the world and reflected in the chronicles long before it acquired a full theological rationalisation.
WRITING ABOUT THE SUPERNATURAL
Some final comments are needed about the scope of this book. Although the discussion focuses primarily on a ‘long’ twelfth century, I have occasionally reached outside this period in order to examine particular themes. This is especially appropriate when we come to evaluate the shadowy and fragmented evidence for ‘pagan survivals’ in chapter 2. Here we need to think about what this ‘paganism’ which might have ‘survived’ looked like in the first place and to address late instances of supposed survival (in the thirteenth century, for example), lest these render premature claims about an earlier death. But it will also be important to reach out beyond the long twelfth century when considering parochial structures and pastoral care. Thus the abundant synodal legislation of the early thirteenth century will, in particular, be important for the clues it offers about local ecclesiastical infrastructures at the very end of the period.
A book about the supernatural in the twelfth century cannot engage solely with the narrative histories even if it claims a special place for them. I will also draw therefore on a range of other texts such as vitae, miracula, penitentials, synodal legislation, sermon literature and even romances in order to put the chronicle material in context. Normative sources have an important place in this study as they help us to explore aspects of ‘official’ church teaching as they emerged and evolved. Given that some of these texts had a very widespread impact, I have drawn them from a wide compass rather than restricting myself to material composed exclusively within the Anglo-Norman realm itself: Narrative sources, in contrast, are drawn from a more confined area, concentrating on England and Normandy. Even here though, I have sometimes pushed out across political boundaries to include the Scottish borders and southern and eastern Wales. Cultural geography seldom respected political or ecclesiastical frontiers in the middle ages, a tendency magnified by the uncertain limits of Anglo-Norman power as it waxed and waned in the marches of Wales and southern fringes of Scotland. True to these complex political and cultural dynamics, the interests of many of our authors ranged similarly across borders, a tendency most immediately clear in the work of Gerald of Wales but visible too in the writings of Walter Map and the Lanercost chronicler.
A word also needs to be said about terms and labels. Although much ink has already been spilt over the subject, we must ponder for a moment an appropriate vocabulary with which to describe medieval religious culture. I have chosen here to replace rather than refine the language of elite/popular, clerical/lay because even a loose use of such terms, as some historians have recently ventured, risks implying that belief and practice was in some sense ‘socially’ determined. Lingering attachment to terminology formed in an old debate may thus be unhelpful. Instead, patterns in the texts themselves suggest an alternative starting point. Formal teachings of the church, though in some respects still fluid in the twelfth century, can nonetheless be picked out with some confidence, especially in normative texts designed to instruct the faithful. I characterise these therefore as official beliefs. But such teachings mingled in the localities with varied extra-ecclesial beliefs and practices which did not have their roots in the official, and find expression perhaps most frequently in our narrative sources, the miracle collections and chronicles in particular. It is not axiomatic that these were pagan, magical, unchristian, heretical or even heterodox so none of these labels will quite suffice. We might therefore best think of these more colourlessly, initially at least, as sumply ‘unofficial’. Finally, beyond this binary, we also need a further term to capture the organic nature of lived religion in the locality because belief and practice in communities frequently seems to have blended official and unofficial, so much so that demarcation lines were invisible to the eyes of local beholders. ‘Popular religion’ has entirely the wrong connotations, conjuring an image of a layer of belief which was unofficial and yet possessed of a certain uniformity. Instead I intend to speak about the Christianity or religion of the parishes because this formulation offers more scope for the variety that recent commentators have identified in belief and practice at the local level.°°
In one sense, the structure of this book needs little explanation since its chapter headings are self-explanatory. Yet beneath the evident agendas of each chapter there are large issues that should perhaps be laid out. Chapter 1, “Thinking about the Supernatural’ picks up an issue we have already met: the extent to which lines may have existed between ‘nature’ and ‘supernature’ in the minds of twelfth-century believers. The second chapter probes another issue we have touched upon, namely whether twelfth-century ideas about the ‘supernatural’ might have owed anything to residues of pagan belief surviving in the interstices of Christianity or beneath a crust of superficial conformity. Chapter 3, ‘Prayers, Spells and Saints’, shifts the emphasis to an examination of tensions intrinsic to medieval Christian belief itself, considering how the wonder-seeking and meditative impulses within medieval religion variously co-existed and competed. The next two chapters then pick up different aspects of these two strands in religious culture and explore them separately. Chapter 4, ‘Special Powers and Magical Arts’, examines a series of case studies of the worldly uses of supernatural power and the church’s response to these. The penultimate chapter, ‘Imagining the Dead’, considers attitudes to sin, penitence and the fate of souls. In so doing it also fulfils a second function because it looks at the ways in which the ‘rising’ churchmen of the schools were seeking to reinterpret the afterlife and to negotiate a new theology which balanced the worldly interests of the faithful and the fate of their souls after death. This chapter thus works as a case study of ‘re-evangelisation’, of the process by which school-trained churchmen of reformist inclination sought to transform the religious culture of medieval England and implant a revised form of belief and practice through preaching and catechesis. The sixth and final chapter brings us full circle to make a further tentative argument: that the supernatural was not simply a subject of reflection but came to be mobilised, and in strikingly new ways, as a didactic instrument.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق